Forbes Tech Cover Story Today

Quentin Hardy at Forbes gets it pretty right today with an article on Cisco in the Data Center. As we evolve the network to becoming more of a platform, and applications evolve to SOA and Cloud architectures – i.e. the most network centric application architectures ever. The network plays an increasing role in the data center. I have to give Quentin some grief for not quoting me (darn!) but he got John Chambers and McCool and Prem so we’re well covered. One or two factual things- our new data center is in Richardson, Texas; not RTP. Primarily for the redundant power grids that are available to us there. It has about a 10Mw critical load. We are also expanding Webex data centers to ensure global service delivery as we pass the 7M minutes a month mark on that SaaS offering. Our Catalyst switching line is the one Quentin is referring to that is around $10B a year, growing nicely in the data center too, even as we introduce the Nexus line which is purpose built for the data center. And Quentin, thanks for the grief on naming 🙂 Got some ideas for me there? Nexus came to me in the shower one morning…. (bad joke) but yeah as a certain point we regress to boring numbers. Are we as bad as HP with the BL495c? And lastly, the NX-OS operating system was internally developed by Cisco engineers and stemmed in part from our acquisition of Procket Networks engineering assets. NX-OS is now on the Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000, and was used as the core for our ACE system development. Next week we expand it a bit into some other products as well as an interesting new area.The thing I think Quentin nails though is that the application architecture is coming to the network. The next evolution of what we created with the global connectivity offered by the Internet (will alwyas use the Big I) is these large data center and cloud computing infrastructures and this is an area we have focused on for a very long time that is now coming into the light of day and into its own while in a period of economic turbulence, technology disruption, and market transition. What better time to broaden your focus, build systems and solutions, and purpose build products for key market opportunities. There are some markets that are stagnant in innovation where the systems vendors have sold out their innovation and creativity to other companies and silicon providers that are ripe for disruption and innovation that captures market opportunities. It’s going to be one very very fun year. Speaking of this- check out what we are introducing on Tuesday. In the words of the famous anchorman Ron Burgundy, “it’s kind of a big deal.”

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